Two Stop Bits | larsbrinkhoff's comments

larsbrinkhoff 1 day ago | parent | on: The PDP-10: history and replica
It's not a given that a "Unix" on a PDP-10 would have taken off like the PDP-11 version did. I believe the success of Unix was partially because it ran on an inexpensive and wildly popular mini.
Even as a PDP-10 fan, I have to admit that the PDP-10 was not exactly the wave of the future during the 1970s. It had a decent niche and a steadfast following, but sooner or later it would have disappeared in favor of 8-bit byte addressed computers.
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- KODust 1 day ago
  Real alternative history territory here, but one path possible path is that it still have been attractive enough to port to the VAX, and we'd have ended up in roughly same place. Lots of handwaving and assumptions, of course.
  I'm not sure Unix failing to take off would have been bad. It would certainly be a different world.
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  - larsbrinkhoff 22 hours ago
    Some random thoughts. Writing a timesharing system for a computer with a 16-bit address space forced the Unix philosophy with many small single-purpose programs passing data between them. A timesharing system on a PDP-10 wouldn't have this constraint, and may well not have developed the Unix philosophy. Maybe that would have removed some of the appeal of "Unix-10".
    Second, the VAX grew from the PDP-11 as a 32-bit addressing extension. So porting from the PDP-11 to the VAX is rather natural and easy. In contrast, the PDP-10 is rather different from both the PDP-11 and VAX. Programs written in assembly language will not port over. If Bell labs would have developed a C language for the PDP-10, I wager it would have looked different and not have become popular in an 8-bit byte world.
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    - bmonkey325 14 hours ago
      Some forget that Unix started out on the pdp-7 which was 18-bit words so in some ways the architecture argument doesn’t really hold up. I think it’s more what machine were they could access.
      https://linfo.org/pdp-7.html#:~:text=The%20PDP-7%20was%20a%2....
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      - KODust 11 hours ago
        Yes, this is the thing -- it's clear that Ken Thompson valued simplicity, one reason being that he and a couple of other people could maintain the entire thing without a large support organization. Whether that would have survived the PDP-10, I'm not sure. But I suspect it would have have been recognizably Unix.
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  - bmonkey325 1 day ago
    Is this the parallel universe where Mac won and Windows faded into obscurity. Amiga took over gaming and PlayStation and XBox never happened ? .
    Also. Steve Jobs lives…..
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    - KODust 11 hours ago
      Dave Cutler stayed at DEC, shipped popular workstations built with PRISM chips, Microsoft and IBM kissed and made up and we're all using Windows derived from OS/2 w/Presentation Manager today.
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      - bmonkey325 5 hours ago
        Put that way. In the hear and now, I realize we are in the darkest timeline.
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larsbrinkhoff 1 day ago | parent | on: The PDP-10: history and replica
Foonly and Systems Concepts seemed to have a decent business, although their customer base was largely restricted to one each: Tymshare and Compuserve, respectively.
The PARC clones were two-off.
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larsbrinkhoff 61 days ago | parent | on: Scenarios for Using Arpanet Computers (in 2025)
The title refers to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc254.txt
larsbrinkhoff 68 days ago | parent | on: Ontario’s ICON Computer
Fleur looks like typical turtle graphics. Yep, Wikipedia lists a Logo implementation.
larsbrinkhoff 114 days ago | parent | on: Chaosnet host status - updated live
See https://chaosnet.net/global for more information.
larsbrinkhoff 127 days ago | parent | on: The vintage ROM database
The web site reads as if only PC compatibles have ROMs.
larsbrinkhoff 179 days ago | parent | on: Wasm translation of PDP-7 Space Travel
Space Travel was faithfully translated from PDP-7 assembly language to C, and then compiled to wasm. See https://github.com/mohd-akram/st for details.
- masswerk 172 days ago
  Great! Maybe add the controls and gameplay description to the hosted page, so that users may learn how to interact?
larsbrinkhoff 179 days ago | parent | on: The earliest Unix code: An anniversary source code...
That was a few years ago. Since then, most (all?) listings have been typed in, assembled, and run on a PDP-7 emulator. Even the infamous Space Travel game/simulation works.
Here is a faithful translation of Space Travel to C, and compiled to wasm: https://akr.am/st/
larsbrinkhoff 329 days ago | parent | on: Incompatible Timesharing System - the restoration ...
Includes such classics as: Maclisp, Scheme, Macsyma, TECO, Emacs, the Magic Switch, the Jargon file, Logo, CLU, Zork, Adventure, Maze, MacHack VI, Spacewar.